A middle-aged woman drives her late-model sedan through the four-way stop without so much as touching the brake pedal. She’s too busy chatting on her cell phone to worry about such details. A teenaged girl slows down but still rolls through another stop sign; her attention is focused on the application of eye makeup. A guy in a jacked-up 4WD pickup rounds the 10-mph curve at four times that speed, apparently anxious to get…somewhere else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As I see these incidents repeated over and over on a daily basis, it occurs to me that we have “progressed” to the point where driving an automobile is simply an activity which occurs while we’re doing something else, physically and\/or mentally. If driving was a musical genre, it would be “elevator music,” something takes takes place in the background, only dimly perceived in our subconcious, if at all.
How many times have you driven across the town where you live, taking a familiar route, and upon arrival at your destination cannot remember a single detail about the trip?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s a wonder any of us survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
[This post has absolutely<\/em> nothing to do with the fact that my 17-year old niece got her full driver’s license last Friday! Absolutely nothing.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which the concept of driving a car is equated to elevator music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10225,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions\/10225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}